Two men in dark suits stood on the mat outside. Both of them wore bowler hats; neither of them carried sticks or gloves.
"Mr. Simon Templar?" queried one of them, in a voice of astounding refinement.
Simon nodded, and they moved determinedly through the door with a concerted solidity which would certainly have obstructed any attempt he might have made to slam it in their faces.
"I am Inspector Nassen," said the genteel spokesman, "and I have a warrant to search your flat."
"Bless my soul!" ejaculated the Saint, with his juiciest lisp. "So you're one of our new public-school policemen. How perfectly sweet!"
The other's lips tightened.
"We'll start with searching you," he said shortly.
His hands ran over the Saint's pockets in a few efficient movements which were sufficient to assure him that Simon had no lethal weapon on his person. The Saint restrained a natural impulse to smack him on the nose and smiled instead.
"This is a great game, Snowdrop, isn't it?" he said. "Personally I'm broad-minded, but if you did these things to a lady she might misunderstand you."
Nassen's pale face flushed wrathfully, and an unholy gleam came into the Saint's eye. Of all the detectives who ought never to have called upon him, one who was so easily baited was booked for a rough passage before he ever set out.
"We'll go over the flat now," he said.
Simon led them into the living room and calmly set about refilling his sherry glass.
"Pat," he explained casually, "these are two little fairies who just popped through the keyhole. They seem to want to search the place and see if it's all cleany-weeny. Shall we let them get on with it?"
"I suppose so," said Patricia tolerantly. "Did they wipe their tootsy-wootsies before they came in?"
"I'm afraid not," said the Saint. "You see, they aren't very well-bred little fairies. But when you have a beautiful Oxford accent you aren't supposed to need manners as well. You should just hear Snowdrop talking. Sounds as if all his teeth were loose…"
He went on in the same vein throughout the search, with an inexhaustible resource of wicked glee, and it was two very red and spluttering men who faced him after they had ransacked every room under the running commentary with which he enlivened their tour.
"Get your hat," Nassen said. "You're comin along with us."
Simon put down his glass — they were back in the living room then.
"On what charge, Snowdrop?" he inquired.
"The charge is being in possession of information contrary to the Official Secrets Act."
"It sounds a mouthful," Simon admitted. "Shall I pack my powder puff as well, or will you be able to lend me one?"
"Get your hat!" Nassen choked out in a shaking voice.
The Saint put a cigarette between his lips and stroked a thumb over the cog of his lighter. He looked at Patricia through the first feather of smoke, returning the lighter to his pocket, and the carless twinkle in his eyes might or might not have been an integral part of the smile that flitted across his brown face. "It looks as if we shall have to finish our talk later, old darling," he murmured. "Snowdrop is in a hurry. Save some sherry for me, will you? — I shan't be long."
Almost incredulously, but with a sudden leap of uncomprehending fear, she watched him saunter serenely from the room, and through the open door he saw him pick up his raincoat from the hall chair and pause to adjust his soft hat to its correct piratical angle before he went out. Long after he had gone, she was still trying to make herself believe that she had seen Simon Templar, the man who had tantalized all the forces of law and order in the world for more years than any of them liked to be reminded of, arrested as easily as that.
III
Riding in a taxi between the two detectives, the Saint looked at his watch and saw that he had been in England less than four hours, and he had to admit that the pace was fairly rapid even by his exacting standards. One whiskered hold-up mer-chant, an unidentified shadower in a taxi, and two public-school detectives worked out at a reasonably hectic average for the time involved; but Simon knew that that was only a preliminary sample of the kind of attention he could expect while he remained the holder of Her Wedding Secret.
On either side of him, Nassen and the other sleuth licked their sores in silence. Whether they were completely satisfied with the course of events so far is not known, nor does the chronicler feel that posterity will greatly care. Simon thought kindly of other possible ways of adding to their martyrdom; but before he had made his final choice of the various forms of torment at his disposal the taxi was stopped by a traffic light at the corner of St. James's Street, and the Saint looked through the window from a range of less than two yards full into the chubby red face and sleepy eye' of the man without whom none of his adventures were really complete.
Before either of the other two could stop him he had slung himself forward and loosed a delighted yell through the open window.
"Claud Eustace, by the bed socks of Dr. Barnardo!" cried the Saint joyfully.
The man's drowsy optics revolved towards the source of the sound, and, having located it, widened with indescribable eloquence. For a second or two he actually stopped chewing on his gum His jaws seized up, and his portly bowler-hatted figure halted statuesquely.
There were cogent and fundamental reasons for the tableau — reasons which were carved in imperishable letters across the sluggish coagulation of emotions which Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal himself would have been much too diffident to call his soul. They were reasons which went way back through the detective's life to those almost unimaginably distant blissful days before anyone in England had ever heard of the Saint — the days when a policeman's lot had been a reasonably happy one, moving through well-ordered grooves to a stolid and methodical percentage of success, and there had been no such incalculable filibuster sweeping at intervals into the peaceful scene to tie all averages in knots and ride such rings round the wrath and vengeance of Scotland Yard as had never been ridden before. They were reasons which could have been counted one by one on Mr. Teal's grey hairs; and all of them surged out of his memory in a solid phalanx at such moments as that, when the Saint returned to England after an all-too-brief absence, and Mr. Teal saw him in London again and knew that the tale was no searer its end than it had ever been.
All these things came back to burden Mr. Teal's overloaded heart in that moment's motionless stare; and then with a sigh he stepped to the window of the taxicab and faced his future stoically.
"Hullo," he said.
The Saint's eyebrows went up in a rising slant of mockery.
"Claud!" he protested. "Is that kind? I ask you, is that a brotherly welcome? Anyone might think you weren't pleased to see me."
"I'm not," said Mr. Teal dourly. "But I shall have to see you."
The Saint smiled.
"Hop in," he invited hospitably. "We're going your way."
Teal shook his head — that is the simplest way of describing the movement, but it was such a perfunctory gesture that it simply looked as if he had thought of making it and had subsequently decided that he was too tired.
"Thanks," he said. "I've got another job to do just now. And you seem to be in good company." His baby-blue eyes, restored to their habitual affectation of sleepiness, moved over the two embarrassed men who flanked the Saint. "You know who you're with, boys," he told them. "Watch him."
"Pardon me," said the Saint hastily. "I forgot to do the honours. This specimen on my left is Snowdrop, the Rose of Peckham—"